The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Author:Michael Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

III

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S DATA

AS SHE WALKED the path that the tornado had torn through the American town, she was struck by how hard it would have been to imagine what she was now seeing. Two days earlier, on May 22, 2011, the wind had cleaved Joplin, Missouri, in two, leaving behind a lot of you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it stuff: a rubber hose run entirely through a tree trunk; a chair sideways, all four legs piercing a wall; a giant Walmart tractor trailer thrown two hundred yards onto the top of what had been the Pepsi building; a full-size SUV folded in half around a tree. The metal had been flayed from the car, and the tree was no longer a tree but a tree trunk, as all the branches had snapped and blown away. “I felt like some giant had taken an egg beater and run it through a town,” said Kathy Sullivan. “It was toothpicks.”

Then she realized that the egg beater metaphor was not exactly right, as the edges of the destruction were eerily undisturbed. What the tornado had narrowly missed was as perfectly preserved as what it had hit was perfectly eliminated. “It was like when you run your finger through the icing on top of a cake,” she said. “A clean line of total destruction.” Doctors in the local emergency rooms were seeing trauma they’d never seen. Body parts strewn on the ground outside the hospital. A small child, back stripped of flesh right down to the bone: they could count his vertebrae. People impaled by street signs. People with wounds that looked as if they were caused by automatic rifles—except that the objects deep inside them were not bullets. Seriously injured people had driven themselves to the hospital with dead loved ones in their cars and apologized to the hospital staff. They didn’t know what else to do with the bodies.

Tornado outbreaks in the middle of the United States that spring had killed more than five hundred people. In Joplin alone 158 people had died, and thousands had been injured, many critically. That was more than had been killed by a single tornado since the U.S. government had taken on the job of warning people about them. In and of itself this was shocking, but to Kathy Sullivan it was especially so. These people had been informed; the warnings from the National Weather Service, which would soon be reporting to her, had been even better this time than they usually were. The initial tornado watch had come four hours before the event—but then a tornado watch is different from a tornado warning. The average National Weather Service tornado warning comes thirteen minutes before a tornado strikes: Joplin’s sirens had sounded the warning seventeen minutes before the tornado touched down and nineteen minutes before it entered Joplin. But the citizens of Joplin had ignored it. “The majority of surveyed Joplin residents did not immediately go to shelter upon hearing the initial warning. . . ,” as the report Sullivan would soon oversee noted.

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